Susan Boyle: Cat Lady Obliterates Eminem in Sales Rankings

Onetime unemployed cat lady Susan Boyle became a bona fide global superstar Wednesday morning, when Nielsen SoundScan said her debut album, “I Dreamed a Dream” (Syco/Columbia), had sold nearly 701,000 copies during its first week in U.S. stores. That’s the biggest sales week for any album so far this year, eclipsing Eminem’s “Relapse,” which sold 608,000 copies when it came out in May.

“I Dreamed a Dream” also enjoyed the biggest first-week sales by an artist’s debut album since 1993, when Snoop Dogg’s “Doggystyle” sold 803,000 copies in seven days. It is now also the biggest sales week for a debut album by a female solo artist since SoundScan started counting discs back in 1991.

Boyle, 48, vaulted to prominence in April, when the frumpy-looking “Britain’s Got Talent” contestant belted out the song “I Dreamed a Dream,” from “Les Misérables,” razzle-dazzling the TV program’s judges and audience members with her confidence and vocal power. The performance (along with an introduction in which Boyle confessed to living alone with her cat and having “never been kissed–shame!”) was posted on YouTube, where it quickly garnered tens of millions of viewers around the world.

The next month, she narrowly lost an audience vote during the show’s finale, pushing back Sony Music’s plans to record and release her debut album. But the loss ultimately appeared to reinforce Boyle’s underdog appeal, and when the disc was released on Nov. 24, shoppers snapped it up in droves, mostly from unusual outlets like the QVC home-shopping channel, and pharmacies like Walgreen’s and CVS.

While Boyle’s profile was initially established on YouTube, her massive sales tally was also boosted by plenty of old-media exposure. To promote “Dream,” she performed on American network TV shows including “Dancing With the Stars,” “America’s Got Talent” and “Today,” and was featured on network news broadcasts by Katie Couric and others.

Fellow talent-show runner-up Adam Lambert, who was an also-ran on the most recent season of “American Idol,” took the No. 3 spot on this week’s SoundScan tally, selling 198,000 copies of “For Your Entertainment.” That’s more than double the 80,000 sold by “Idol” winner Kris Allen in his first week in stores. (No. 2 belonged to Andrea Bocelli’s “My Christmas.”)